You Go In Pieces

…he had no idea what to do about death.
Two thousand years of flaming Viking boats
and Celtic rites and Irish wakes and Puritan worship
and Unitarian hymns, and still he was left with nothing.”
— Andrew Sean Greer, Less

I pull his bathrobe off the hanger, the one we got him for Christmas, and drape it on the bed. Then I pull out his socks — so meticulously folded — his old shirts, his ratty slippers. I look at all his labeled boxes, his lotions and ointments and my word, there are more than twenty rolls of gauze here. I hold his razor in my hand and run my finger along the blade and think about how it touched his face. I find hundreds of glucose test strips and insulin syringes and I wonder what to do with them. Can I put them on Craigslist?

I used to worry that I would come downstairs one day — to change the laundry or let the dog out — and find him dead in his room when I popped in to say hello. I rolled the scenario around in my mind again and again, unspooling it, looking at it, and then coaching myself to remain calm and cool-headed so I’d be able to check for a pulse and call for an ambulance. But it never happened. I never found him on the floor or slumped over in the bathroom. The boys didn’t discover him with his head bowed on his keyboard and my husband, Jason, didn’t find…